Sharon McCarthy
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    Recent Posts
    Find More Wins Faster

    Find More Wins Faster

    What would YOU do?

    What would YOU do?

    8 Tips for Marketing in the New Now

    8 Tips for Marketing in the New Now

    Strategy or Tactic: What's the Difference?

    Strategy or Tactic: What's the Difference?

    Trend or Faux: Maximalist Design

    Trend or Faux: Maximalist Design

    11 Ways to Free Up Time to Think Strategically

    11 Ways to Free Up Time to Think Strategically

    Marketing Books Worth Reading

    Gift Guide for the Marketing Executive

    Gift Guide for the Marketing Executive

    The 7 Pillars of a Modern Brand

    The 7 Pillars of a Modern Brand

    Is Marketing Killing Democracy?

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    Archive
    • April 2022 (1) 1 post
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    • December 2018 (3) 3 posts
    • September 2018 (4) 4 posts
    • July 2018 (5) 5 posts
    • April 2018 (3) 3 posts
    • April 2016 (1) 1 post
    • December 2015 (1) 1 post
    • October 2015 (1) 1 post
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    the strategic expertise of a big brand with the creativity and agility of a startup

    Confusing Confidence with Competence

    Confusing Confidence with Competence

    One Question to Avoid Hiring Dunning Kruger as Your CMO Dunning Kruger is a term in psychology to describe how people often believe they are smarter and more capable than they really are. Since as a culture, we often confuse confidence with competence, when you're interviewing a potential CMO -- or anyone -- how do you know who’s really competent, and who’s just confident? Who flew standby on a rocket ship, and who landed a plane on the Hudson? Compounding the confusion is
    Do You Have a Prototype or an MVP?

    Do You Have a Prototype or an MVP?

    In a recent post on Linked In, Rand Fishkin, SEO pioneer and founder of Moz, described what happens when you launch a bad MVP. While I agree with Rand's point, I disagree that a lousy MVP is really an MVP at all -- it's a prototype. An MVP is a product with a core group of raving fans (like the Seahawk fans below). It's not a working prototype. It was developed from a series of build-test-learn cycles that started with a prototype. The product is truly unique, and customers
    The Beginners Guide to PPC

    The Beginners Guide to PPC

    An excellent resource brought to you by DiscoSloth, a search marketing company. At 84 pages, it's a long read, but worth reading and saving.
    Podcast Advertising - 10 Questions to Ask

    Podcast Advertising - 10 Questions to Ask

    We have entered the golden age of podcasting. Listeners now have a wide variety of high quality, deeply engaging programming to choose from, and listen habitually at high rates of completion. So marketers have begun to take notice, driving ad spending on podcasting 86% over 2016. However podcasting still remains a relatively uncluttered advertising environment, as measured by my "clutter ratio", calculated by dividing the % of consumers using a medium, by the % of media dolla
    UnBEARable - Lessons From Build-A-Bear

    UnBEARable - Lessons From Build-A-Bear

    There is nothing more powerful in retail than a line out the door. Like the McDonald's 1 million burgers sold sign or the number of reviews in an app store, lines out the door provide what Robert Cialdini calls "social proof", the phenomenon by which we do what other people do simply because we think they know better. Which means, the lines outside the Build-A-Bear stores for it's recent "Pay Your Age" promotion only accelerated sales by causing more customers to join the lin